I started drinking coffee a year ago so I could wean myself off of Coke Zero, and the main thing I've learned in that time is that coffee makes you a complete asshole. I get all pissy now when I haven't had coffee. I get all pissy when I've had too much coffee. I get pissy if I'm having coffee, and the wife is like, "Hey, put down that coffee. The baby's on fire." There are people out there who get pissy if they get coffee and the coffee doesn't taste the way they want their coffee to taste. It's just one giant cup of asshole fuel. I was happier before coffee, man. I didn't act like the world's lamest cocaine addict. I regret becoming a coffee person. This is how Peter King became Peter King. From now, every morning, it's warm gin and a quick snort of gunpowder for me.

Your letters:

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Chris:

My sister lives in Miami, God bless her, and is adamant that LeBron would have gone to Cleveland whether they won a championship this past year or not. I don't believe there is a chance in hell he would have left Miami this year if there was an opportunity to win four championships in a row.

I agree. I think it would be really hard to ditch Miami if it weren't already painfully evident that the rest of the team was right on the brink of falling down a well. If you can leave a fading Miami team for your old franchise—now on the upswing—and have the added bonus of a PR goldmine, then it makes sense. But if that Heat team had won it all, and they also had a bunch of young studs ready to assume major roles and shit? No way. No fucking way he goes back. I TOTALLY KNOW WHAT'S IN LEBRON'S MIND.

By the way, that doesn't mean LeBron is disloyal or a shameless opportunist, it just means he's not a fucking idiot. He saw what everyone else saw in the Finals and adjusted his plans accordingly. Shrewd fellow.

Dave:

So the World Cup has been going on since 1930. 84 years, not too shabby. One billion people watched this year's final from literally all over the world. So how long will World Cups be played? It's hard to imagine that interest would ever wane just to changing tastes in sports. Only the total collapse of world civilization can stop it, right? The ancient Olympics were played from 776 BC to 394 AD, so that's 1,170 years. They only stopped because a Roman emperor banned them. That is what I would set the over/under at for the World Cup: 1,170 years.

I think the only non-apocalyptic scenario where the World Cup would cease to exist would be some kind of scandal/lawsuit that obliterates FIFA as we know it. This is completely within the realm of possibility, given that FIFA is a horrifically corrupt organization that uses this tournament to exploit every last possible weakness in worldwide government bureaucracy. They're so good at building useless stadiums and exploiting workers and brazenly bribing government officials that I doubt anything will ever bring them down (again, short of nuclear war), but you never know if some player will file a CTE lawsuit and produce documentation saying FIFA sold uranium to 50 different terror states, and maybe there's a chance that soccer dies. Or if pro Ultimate Frisbee finally fulfills its destiny. IT COULD HAPPEN!

The popularity of certain sports used to be cyclical: boxing and horse racing, etc. But the biggest pro-sports entities are now so firmly entrenched in the culture—and so symbiotic with corporate and political interests—that they are much harder to bring down. Too many people have too much invested in these sports for them to get wiped out. Even if they invented some kind of jetpack technology that led to the advent of Jetpack Quidditch (I would watch this), the NFL would simply adjust their rules and adopt the technology to keep the sport profitable and relevant. Football makes massive rule changes almost every year, just to optimize its entertainment value. If flying cars happen, they'll figure out a way to make all the players use flying cars. These are now soulless bloodsucking organizations that can never be killed, which is good, because I would miss losing at fantasy football if they ever went away. Remember when people foretold the death of the NFL because of class-action lawsuits? LOL WE'LL JUST PLAY HEADS UP FOOTBAW GANG.

Aaron:

This is probably a really stupid thought, but is there any (however minute) possibility that LeBron is going back to CLE to ensure Johnny Futbol doesn't usurp his star status there?

That is a stupid thought, but it's a FUN stupid thought. I doubt LeBron guards his King of Northeast Ohio crown all that jealously. He is King anywhere he goes. It's not like he's significantly bigger in Cleveland than he is in L.A. or New York or any other major town where people shit themselves if he walks into the room. He's big
everywhere now. He transcends local car dealership ad popularity, even if I will hope and pray that LeBron does thousands of local ads for Bobby Donahue's Buick/Isuzu and Bitty's Fried Shitchili Diner.

Ajay:

Which fans of a major sport have the most unrealistic expectations of players and teams?

College football. It's not even close, really. There are Georgia fans out there who expect a national title win every season. GEORGIA. Georgia couldn't win a fucking ring toss. No sport is more dependent upon self-delusion than college football, mostly because the national title is usually won by one of roughly 10 schools. The other programs in Division I are helpless. I don't even know what Maryland is doing trying to play big-boy football.

And hundreds of thousands of people still go to Tennessee games. Why? Didn't anyone tell them Tennessee BLOWS at football now? You practically have to be insane to be a college football fan. Anyone who takes reality at face value would never bother with it.

The younger a sport's participants, the more insane the expectations are. Since young athletes have little in the way of a track record, you can project all kinds of unreasonable future accomplishments for them. Every year, every coach on every team thinks to himself, "By golly, this team has a chance to be special." And they NEVER are.

Evan:

What if LeBron spends the rest of his career in Cleveland, except it's just like the first time he was there: stellar play, but they can't win a title? Then he retires with two rings won in Miami, even though he spent most of his time in Cleveland. Does Cleveland still love him?

Oh yeah, I think so. If he never wins a title in Cleveland now, fans will just blame CLEVELAND. They'll apologize to LeBron for getting Cleveland all over him and ruining him. And then a 40-year-old LeBron will hook up with some 60-win team and Cleveland people will give him their blessing and be like, "Good luck, LeBron! Sorry we jizzed bad juju all over your back."

Even if he never wins a title, at least he was nice enough to come back and make Cleveland feel pretty again. The only thing Cleveland has over Miami is the moral superiority of voluntarily living in a hellhole like Cleveland. You don't have sandy beaches or fabulous stone crab, but you KEEP IT REAL, by God. And so LeBron coming back is just another way Cleveland people get to delude themselves into thinking they're realer than Miami folk.

By the way, this can all still go to shit. What if the team is fucking awful? What if Kyrie Irving bangs LeBron's mom? What if Dan Gilbert walks into the Cavs locker room and points at LeBron in the shower and tell his friends LOOK AT THAT BEAUTIFUL THOROUGHBRED BODY I OWN? Never underestimate Cleveland's ability to Cleveland this. I know how easily a star-crossed team can take something nice and paint it with diarrhea.

Marcus:

Today in my office of 13 people, one woman brought in what she said was a "small tray" of baklava, that turned out to be a store-bought container with four small pieces. Of course, I want some fucking baklava.

The first time I go downstairs, the container is unopened, and as a lowly intern I'm of course not going to open the fucking container. The next time, however, there's only one piece left. I took a plastic knife and got my grubby fingers all over that baklava and cut off a third of the piece for myself, but what should I have done?

Were you alone? If you're alone with food in a conference room, all bets are off. It's yours to do with as you please, so long as it's not some catering tray with cling wrap that has yet to be breached. If you tear off the sandwich-tray cling wrap prior to the big meeting, there will be hell to pay.

Otherwise, indulge as you see fit. When someone announces there's food in the office, I like to stay in my seat for just an extra beat, to play it cool, like the news hasn't affected me, when in fact my whole world has been rocked. Then I get all casual-like, maybe checking the printer, and then I'm all over that shit. This is particularly urgent if we're talking about baklava, which is a rare "free work food" event and is essentially a human honey trap. Oh, did you just think you'd lift a piece out of the container? LOL NOPE HONEY EVERYWHERE. The top of the pastry lifts off and suddenly there is nut paste flying all over the joint. Baklava is some sinister shit. Tastes great, though.

Eric:

Has there been a professional athlete in the last 15 years that has not donated a single minute or cent to charity work?

Apart from JR Smith? It's unlikely, because I think most sports teams mandate that& players do community work so that they can say they did shit for the KIDS in return for stealing all the county's money. Sure, we appropriated $600 million in junk bonds to build a Bud Light TentPlex next to the stadium, but look at this photo of our backup QB with a cancer kid! LET'S SEE YOU TRY TO GET CYNICAL ABOUT THAT! This is why every NFL team's endzone is festooned with the name of every player's fully tax-deductible charity: Chuck's Champions, Will's Winners, Taylor's Twatpunchers, etc. That probably wasn't Taylor's idea to start Taylor's Twatpunchers. He probably just wanted to go clubbing.

Brian:

How have we not developed a more efficient way to serve three pancakes so that when you pour syrup on them, you get it on more than just the top one?

I usually pour syrup on the stack of pancakes and then make a river around the stack so that there is full groundwater penetration on all sides. This still isn't all that efficient, since the middle pancake gets neglected. The obvious solution is to serve the three pancakes one at a time, or to give the customer a plate large enough for all the pancakes to have their own spot. The latter option is impossible because breakfast-table real estate is always lacking. I need space for the pancakes, the eggs, the hash browns, the side of bacon I ordered, the side of sausage I ordered, the coffee, the orange juice, the water, the cream, and the OTHER side of bacon I ordered. One person's breakfast needs on a Sunday can cover a full acre. This is the only reason people order silver-dollar pancakes, because you can toss those fuckers around like salad and get an even coating.

After a heavy night of binge drinking, I'm usually so starved the next morning that I order everything at the same time. Can I have pancakes AND a burger? Now? Perhaps mashed together? The only solution is to just take your time. Order just the pancakes first, take a side plate, move a couple pancakes over to the side plate, coat the first pancake in a gallon of syrup, eat, and repeat as needed. No one has the patience for this, and frankly, neither do I. I just douse the stack in tree sugar and start cramming it in my mouth like I'm insulating my throat for the winter. I don't even know what I'm eating. Maybe some kind of edible syrup bubble that can be wedged between each flapjack.

HALFTIME!

Ryan:

If Obama said "sure" to the bong hit and taken a quick hit, wouldn't that end the legalization argument overnight?

No, I think the exact opposite would happen. I think people who hated the idea of legalization in the first place would point and scream BAH GAWD EVEN THE PRESIDENT IS ON DEMON WEED NOW, and everyone would freak out. It would be the single biggest bone the culture war has ever gotten to chew on. I mean, we could create and sustain an entire news network on cable devoting solely to arguing 24 hours a day about Obama toking up in public this one time. Congress would push for impeachment. Roger Goodell would attempt to suspend the President for two months. Analysts would go on the air and ask when else Obama has been stoned.
Does he have a problem? Has he already moved onto the smack? It would be fucking horrible.

Also, people would complain about a stoned Obama lowering our defenses abroad. Putin would see Obama take the hit and be like IS TIME TRADE HIM DORITOS FOR OIL PIPELINE. ISIS would make a deeper push into Iraq. The North Korea guy would claim to have won the World Cup personally. You don't want any of this to happen. It's best if Obama is a bit of a tight-ass and politely declines the hit, as he did. Somebody's gotta be the grownup here.

Jerry:

Let's say all cell phones crash. Nothing works on them: internet, text messaging, all apps, calling, etc. You actually have to talk and communicate with people. How many people kill themselves in the first week because they can't function without their phone?

Zero. I don't wanna die without having checked my email one last time. I could even leave a cryptic tweet that people would spend whole minutes trying to decipher. "Why did he quote that Supertramp song before he jumped off that bridge? What does it mean?" Even if you told me, "Dude, the internet's never coming back," and you had a government official lay out precisely why, I would STILL hold out hope that it would return. I would build it myself if I had to. Anything to keep from looking out my window at the wonders of natural existence.

By the way, apropos of nothing, I'm shocked the world hasn't had its first troll suicide yet. Where someone online is like, "God, this Robin Thicke album makes me want to kill myself," and then they DO. And then every gets mad at Robin Thicke for making music shitty enough for a guy to go kill himself. And then the ghost of the guy who died could haunt Thicke's house and moan U MAD BRO all night long. I really thought this would have happened by now.

Matt:

If LeBron had said where he is signing during a World Cup game, does ESPN interrupt the World Cup broadcast, or just flash the news on the bottom?

They would have done a quick cutaway to SportsCenter, then told you to go over to ESPN2 for further analysis. They have a contract to fulfill with FIFA. There's no LeBron clause in that shit.

Ethan:

What is a worse feeling: having to shit really badly or having to piss really badly? I would think most people would automatically think having to shit really badly, but today, after having to piss really badly, I am not so sure.

As someone who once pissed in the
Lincoln Tunnel, I can attest to the fact that having to piss urgently and not being able to is a really awful feeling. When you have to take a shit really badly, people usually understand. They sympathize. They know you've got hazardous material to unload. They will join you in finding salvation. But there are varying degrees of needing to piss that aren't as clear to your fellow minivan passengers. Whenever I gotta piss real bad on the road, my wife is always like, "Hey, you drank too much coffee." AND THAT IS SO NOT THE POINT AT THIS MOMENT. Save the life lessons for AFTER I find a tree to fertilize.

I took a road trip with the kids a couple weeks ago, and sure as shit, I had to piss real bad before we made it to the hotel. So I got off at our exit and assumed there would be civilization on the side road, which you should never assume. Sure as shit, we were in the middle of what may as well have been the Gobi desert. It took five agonizing miles before we found a gas station, and it was so some podunk local station with two out-of-order shitters. I ran behind the station and pissed on the wall. I would have pissed on the whole town if I could have. Get your shit together, gas stations of America.

Let's go back-to-back with poop questions.

Adam:

Some friends and I need a longstanding debate settled. Would you prefer shitting in the greatest bathroom in the world with the worst one-ply in existence, or a horrible gas station bathroom with Quilted Northern 17-ply? I think we were all surprised how polarizing this debate became.

I would take the fancy bathroom, because if I'm in a calm and serene bathroom environment, I will produce a better quality bowel movement. If you're in some awful bathroom, you're not gonna have a great shit, regardless of the quality of tissue. Your sphincter will freak out and half-tighten, and then it fun-factory time. Whereas you walk into the baller bathroom, and everything is made of gold and marble, and Enya plays in the background, and the designer Japanese toilet washes your balls for you… that stool will just DROP out of you. You probably won't even need to wipe. Shit, I'll wipe my ass with the jade monkey statue in the corner. It's not like they'll invite me to shit there again anyway.

Josh:

As an announcer, what is the most difficult sport to call?

Oh, hockey. You got the puck traveling around at light speed and foreign names to pronounce. Shit, football barely NEEDS announcers, while Doc Emrick is over here busting his ass. He could probably suck the skin off a peach at this point.

Email of the week!

Brian:

We were out doing some day drinking back in our early twenties. It must have been St Patty's Day or something. We ended up at a bar in a local urban ho- spot district. One of the fellas at the bar starts telling us about this secret rub-n-tug joint across the street where you can get whatever you want. So two of the members of our party that were single and hard up for some loving decide to head over. About a half hour later, one of them makes it back fully fulfilled. Another hour passes and the other guy still hasn't come back yet. Finally he shows up, his hair soaking wet and very disheveled. He proceeds to tell us what happened.

He enters the joint and is led to a "massage room". He strips down to his boxers and sits there on the massage table waiting for the girl to enter. A girl comes in, but she then takes his hand and leads him out of the room (still only in his boxers). She takes him down the stairs and into a basement room with only an old stained mattress in the corner. She then leaves the room. He is starting to wonder what the hell is going on, and decides he is going to bail out. But the door is locked and he can't get out. All of his stuff is still upstairs in the massage room.

He waits in the room for a while, and finally the door opens up. Some Chinese guy comes storming in with a hose and sprays him down with a very strong stream of freezing cold water. Finally the guy leaves and he is left again in this basement room, now soaking wet and cold. Then the girls comes back, throws his clothes at him and leads him out a basement door into an alley way and slams the door shut. He then gets dressed and realizes they stole his wallet and phone. He then ends up back at the bar. We tried to go back over and get his stuff back, but no one would answer the door, and he was too embarrassed to call the cops. Was this some kind of rub-n-tug-joint scam? How many people have they done this too?